Month: December 2016

In November 1164, at the height of his dispute with Henry II, Thomas Becket crossed the Channel and went into exile in France. Taking refuge at the Burgundian abbey of Pontigny, the Archbishop of Canterbury gave himself over to private...

Get up, get up!’ Lying on the ground sweating and bleeding next to his bicycle – ‘that machine’, as he ruefully referred to it – his cycling instructor heckling from the sidelines, the young Japanese professor’s short stay in London...

‘Oaths are but words, and words but wind/Too feeble implements to bind’, Samuel Butler suggested in his Restoration satire Hudibras. It was to such ‘feeble implements’ however, that Sajid Javid, the UK government’s Communities Secretary, resorted in suggesting that an...

Today’s wave of desperate asylum seekers fleeing the Middle East and North Africa is sometimes seen as a return to the late 1940s, when millions were set adrift by the unprecedented violence of the Second World War. Yet the opening...

Below are the ten most popular articles published on historytoday.com during 2016. For more great history writing, download our Best of 2016 special via the History Today app. The Strange Afterlife of Pontius Pilate Kevin Butcher explores the enduring legacy of the Roman...

In the autumn of 1944, the fate of Budapest’s Jews hung in the balance. Six months previously, uncertain of the intentions of their hitherto loyal Axis ally, the Germans had occupied Hungary, bringing with them the grim machinery of the...

Sir Francis Humphreys and two senior colleagues shot a snipe and a woodcock in a copse not far from the British Legation in Kabul they called Woodcock Wood. It was a poor bag, not helped by the weather. The entry...

The Foundling Hospital (which continues today as the children’s charity Coram) had a long history of improving the lives of children. Established by the philanthropist Thomas Coram in 1739 in response to the number of abandoned children left to die...

Born into a peasant family in Siberia in 1869, Grigori Efimovich Rasputin grew up as a drunken, illiterate narcissist, who seems to have eagerly cherished a delusion that he was the most important being in the universe. He joined an...

The representation of the People Act of 1918 gave the parliamentary franchise to women – or at least those women over 30 years of age who were either occupiers of property with an annual rent of £5 or over, or...